“I’m really thrilled because it’s really unusual for a documentary to be competing with the major films being released in the summer,” D’Souza told POLITICO. “Summer is usually a fun-movie time and normally it would be considered risky to release a documentary in August. Normally you would wait until September when attention returns back to politics.”

“2016” has “grossed an impressive $1.2 million last weekend,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, and is already the 12th highest-grossing political documentary of all time. (Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” occupies the top spot.)

And the film looks to be getting even bigger: It opens in 1,075 theaters on Friday night.

“This is a big weekend for us,” D’Souza said. “I want to give Michael Moore a run for his money.”

D’Souza says the popularity of the film has confirmed the suspicion of many that the media is in cahoots with the Obama administration.

“There is a real hunger for information about Obama and a sense that information is not being covered or, in some cases, even being withheld,” he said. “There is a sense that there are elements of the media that are protective of Obama, that they would rather block a story that is embarassing about Obama than let the American public decide.”

“Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president’s campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother’s keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of The New York Times. But none of them are touching it,” D’Souza said. “This is a vindication of what people fear, which is that there is an embargo on relevant information.”

The success of the film has prompted D’Souza to ponder spending more time in movies.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “What I’ve realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it’s very powerful.”

If not, his day job is doing okay, too. His latest book, “Unmaking the American Dream,” will debut at number five on this Sunday’s New York Times bestseller list.